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Machiavelli With Malaprops

When I heard late last week that Tennessee Sen. Lamar Alexander—a Republican who was apoplectic about Harry Reid’s changing the Senate’s hoary filibuster rules—had said the majority leader should have the words “The End of the Senate” etched on his tombstone, I imagined what Reid’s reaction would be: a broad, wry smile.

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In covering Reid for more than 25 years, I have seen that smile so many times. Reid is the most unconventional of politicians, one who cares little about public perception and delights in infuriating the opposition. He is the kind of guy who might walk up to Alexander and say, “Lamar, I hope you’ll deliver the eulogy so people really know what I have done.”

The former boxer’s ability to absorb blows and, even more importantly, to counterpunch, perhaps with an occasional hit below the belt, are the secrets of his longevity—and no doubt he will deploy them once again as the Senate fights this week over the budget deal. Unlike most of the preening Club of 100, Reid expends little effort tending to his public image. Driving home messages (the Tea Party is destructive) and advancing legislation (the nuclear option) are what energize this tireless son of Searchlight, Nev., a speck of a town outside Las Vegas where Reid’s hardscrabble childhood helped produce a man impervious to most political considerations and virtually immune to criticism.

The majority leader is a mélange of contradictions—a Machiavelli with malaprops (otherwise known as Reidisms)—but you can’t understand them just from the vantage point of the theater up on Capitol Hill. I’ve seen them revealed over a quarter century of close observation back in Nevada, where Reid, 74, has always been both a study in outperforming expectations and a political fighter with bare-knuckles ambition. Many still puzzle over this—how Reid can be at once a seemingly soulless manipulator of the process while occasionally revealing deeply held beliefs; a religious man proud of his Mormon faith who has metamorphosed into a social progressive; and an outwardly meek, bland figure whose cutthroat ways make him easily the most feared man in Nevada by politicians of both parties.

But Reid being Reid is inevitably on display when he comes back home. Consider his news-making tour of the state a few days ago, during which he managed to crassly describe Lucy Flores, an assemblywoman he hopes to install as the Democratic candidate for lieutenant governor, as “demographically… perfect. Young, dynamic, Hispanic,” while calling another congressman from the state both a “lightweight” and “hypocritical.” He even sneered at his fellow Nevada senator, Dean Heller, by comparing him unfavorably to his predecessor, John Ensign, who had an affair with his best friend’s wife. “I miss John Ensign,” Reid told the Las Vegas Sun. “He was a man of his word.”

And then the topper, the Reidism of the week: When asked about his 2011 comments that prostitution in Nevada should be outlawed, Reid waved the white flag and said the only thing he’s doing right now to fight prostitution is “not giving them any business. That’s my protest.”

For a guy who seems perpetually joyless (he’s not), Reid has been a joy to cover. His foot-in-mouth disease. His wry sense of humor—yes, he has one. His constant interference in other races. His surprising evolution on all manner of topics. But most of all, I continue to marvel at Reid’s indomitability—his ability keep alive a political career that should have been entombed nearly 40 years ago, when he lost his first Senate race by 611 votes and then followed that up with a landslide loss for mayor of Las Vegas six months later.

Reid is the ultimate political survivor, and I was lucky enough to have a front-row seat for two of his near-death experiences, in 1998 and 2010. The boxing metaphors so often wielded to describe the former pugilist have become hackneyed, but it’s true that Reid is the elected version of Rocky Balboa—ever the underdog, always taking a beating but somehow emerging with his hands raised upwards, battered but still standing.

To truly understand Reid, you have to go back to the beginning. To 1986. When Jim Santini launched his candidacy for the U.S. Senate that year, he could not have expected what would happen at his opening news conference.

A reporter had somehow gotten access to documents from an old, unresolved Federal Election Commission case and peppered the former congressman with questions about it. Santini, known to perspire, began sweating profusely.

That was the image Harry Reid, then an ambitioustwo-term congressman,and his campaign team were looking for—and they would go on to use the video from that press conference over and over during the campaign in a series of ads about the Democrat-turned-Republican with the tagline: “Which Jim Santini do you believe?”

The reporter who asked the questions had been fed the information by a former colleague who left journalism to work for Reid’s campaign. It was brutal and effective; it was consummate Harry Reid.

I began covering Nevada politics for the Las Vegas Review-Journal shortly after that news conference. I was in my mid-20s and had been in Nevada for two years covering cops and county government. When another reporter left the paper abruptly, I was thrown into the hurly-burly of a nationally watched Senate race between Reid, then 46, and Santini, who had been persuaded by retiring Republican Sen. Paul Laxalt to switch parties and run as a Republican for his vacant seat. It was the beginning of my long stint covering the most fascinating figure in Nevada politics—a thoroughly unprepossessing man and manifestly terrible candidate who nonetheless achieved unlikely campaign victories and went on to reach the pinnacle of congressional power.

Jon Ralston, contributing editor at Politico Magazine, has covered Nevada politics for more than a quarter-century. He has worked for both major Las Vegas newspapers and now has his own site, email newsletter and television program.